Traditionally, the teaching of foreign languages has taken place in the school classroom where a teacher instructed students in their presence and measured their progress through written and oral examinations. With the advent of computer networking, the classroom has moved from the schools to the Internet, a global network of networks, particularly the World Wide Web (“Web”). Accordingly, students now can learn to speak and write in a foreign language online, i.e., over the network, by using a computer system to connect to servers and Web sites on the network that offer language-learning courses and software.
People have long recognized that private tutorship, in which the student has his or her own teacher, is a highly effective method for learning. Whereas in classrooms with one teacher for multiple students, the attention of the teacher is divided among students, and some students fail to participate actively in the lessons.
Administering private tutorship over a global network, however, becomes more complicated as the number of students and teachers who want to participate in online private instruction grows. The difficulties of coordinating such private tutorship increase further because these teachers and students can live anywhere the world, so long as they have access to the global network. Large time differences between some teachers and their students create the unwanted possibility of inconvenient matches for one or both of them.
Thus, it is desirable to provide a system and a method that can generate effective matches between teachers and students to facilitate teaching online private instruction over a global network.